3. the full paper can be
found at:
http://j.mp/9MCRD4
This will be a more practical talk than the original paper.
It was aimed at a broad audience that wasn’t familiar with Koha or Kete.
Obviously I would be mostly preaching to the converted at this conference.
One thing that should be acknowledged is the debt the project owes to Horowhenua Library
Trust. The software was originally written for Kete Horowhenua which some of you will be
familiar with.
Joann Ransom and Rosalie Blake and the rest of Horowhenua Library Trust were again
visionary in their commitment to using an open source solution and coming to Katipo with an
inspired idea. We ended up creating HLT’s second big open source project, Kete.
The original paper gives more details about the whys and hows, but a thanks is owed to HLT
for leading the way, again.
Russel Garlick, the original Katipo project manager, is also owed thanks.
4. What I’ll be covering
today
• What is Kete?
• How to integrate Kete and Koha?
I’ll introduce the Kete project and give some background on why it is useful to users of Koha.
I’ll give a tour of how a Kete site can pull in results from a Koha OPAC.
We’ll also look at Koha’s search results querying a Kete site.
If we have time we may cover:
* What useful tools and strategies can we reuse for other services.
* Why I’m excited about Kete 2.0 and discovery of library resources.
7. Actor
(& photographer & filmmaker)
photograph by Raphael Matto
As an actor, I also value:
* immediacy (of expression)
* truthfulness
* perspective (often multiple, on the same topic)
8. Antarctic Garbageman
(& gas station attendant & janitor)
Antarctica is, of course, a stunning place. I came home with lots of photos.
It also had:
* incredible history of
- exploration
- human behavior in an extreme location
- of work
+ most vehicles, buildings, and machines have names that were lovingly decided
+ some of the equipment, some of the Caterpillar tractors, date back to when Edmond
Hillary drove them to the Pole in the 50s. Just ask someone that has been around for awhile
about a name of a vehicle and you would often get a complete oral history of it.
I’ve always wanted to do a site called “Antarctic Stories”, maybe one day. I think Kete would
be an excellent platform for it.
10. Being an open source
computer nerd!
I came back after wintering over Antarctica in 1996 with a desire to put my photographs on the web
* Introduced to photo.net and Philip Greenspun and Web Tools Review (a forum for those developing
database backed websites)
* Started using open source software to host my photos on the web
* Took a free bootcamp and got hired out of it for arsDigita
* Started contributing to arsDigita Community System open source project as an employee
* Also started helping others build collaborative community websites (usually based on an open source
platform of some sort and usually with some aspect of the result be contributed back to an open source
project). I’ve been doing it for almost 12 years professionally and a few years before that semi-
professionally.
All this put me in a great position to help create Kete.
11. What is Kete?
Kete is an online platform that combines tools from
content management systems and digital repositories
with the directness and low barrier of use of a wiki and
the resource findability of the social web.
In practice, it is a publishing, collaboration, and sharing
engine.
13. an ongoing communal
brain dump
Your Kete mileage may vary depending on the quality of your brains.
In seriousness, what your Kete is, much as many or your community facing projects, is really
defined by its purpose and the quality of effort you put into it.
Kete is thus a platform for you and your users to express yourselves. What you come up with
is up to you.
What have people come up with?
15. This isn’t a complete display, there are probably a dozen more sites in New Zealand that
aren’t listed yet.
It’s been fun to see others take up Kete and do new things with it.
16. At its core, Kete has the philosophy that putting
something online is only the beginning of that
thing’s lifecycle, not the end of it.
It should be like planting a seed. If planted well
and looked after, seeds should grow and bear
fruit.
18. What’s really interesting about this topic is that that the little seed, the call for people to
gather their information in the topic, grew into a cluster of information on the site.
It’s a way for users to self curate information. Create a topic that guides the action of your
users and then they will pitch in, usually based on the intent of the topic, but sometimes in
beautiful and unexpected ways that were even better than your idea.
You can see the variety of types of items that Kete supports. Obviously the amount of images
collected about the earthquake compared to all those on flickr is not huge, but it’s not
insignificant either and it is tied directly to specific topics, such as streets or a building. From
there a lot more information can be added.
I’m particularly impressed that someone has uploaded a piece of audio that records the sound
of an aftershock from inside a shed.
19. http://chinesecommunity.org.nz/en/chinese_new_year_2010/topics/preview/148?
version=51
Here we have the Chinese Digital Community a joint project of the New Zealand Chinese
Association, Auckland Branch, and Auckland City Libraries.
After the most recent Chinese New Years celebration, they ran a photo contest. People could
submit their photos at the library or on the site.
They then ran a poll on the site, in this topic, you can see that it is an earlier version of it, to
gather votes for the best photo from judge selected nominations.
This is a great example of the extra little work that does wonders for community
engagement.
20. http://chinesecommunity.org.nz/en/chinese_new_year_2010/topics/show/148-vote-
now-2010-digital-photo-competition
Here’s the version of the topic, the latest, that announces the results.
One thing I like about this is that all the nominations, even those that were just submitted,
are available to browse and I can decide for myself what I think of the results. Other aspects
of the collection are discoverable in a variety of ways, too.
I can carry on to related topics, like Chinese New Years generally, or perhaps a biography of
the photographer that won.
But there is also something else captured by this topic...
21. ...reactions to the results!
In the discussion we have someone that has a bone to pick with how they were chosen and
then someone else that disagrees with “Passerby”.
For me, this is great. It takes the responsibility of having to reflect the perspectives of all
users off the staff of the site and lets the users speak for themselves.
22. Scratch your own itch!
In other words, Kete provides a place for users to do what we are used to in the Open Source
community. That is to “scratch your own itch”, but this is in the form of content and
information for their community.
This is one of those things that sometimes makes it hard to describe Kete. Each site is
different and can be used for dramatically different purposes. It’s a pretty loose and flexible
platform of tools.
23. http://kete.pukekura.org.nz/site/topics/show/76-racecourse-to-bowl-new-access-road-
proposed
Here’s a topic that really shows that.
In this case, the Friends of Pukekura Park are spreading information about a proposed road
alteration in Pukekura Park. They used Kete Pukekura Park to inform their members about
what was happening as well as to educate the New Plymouth City Council as to what
alternative proposals they were putting forward.
They were successful in fighting the original proposal from Council.
24. You can see that they collected many related items, such as links to news articles, recordings
of interviews and talks about the issue, uploaded documents including reports and
engineering plans, and images of a series of protests by George Fuller at the park.
This all served to help them persuade Council and the public about why the proposal should
be reconsidered.
So using Kete can be quite practical.
They also captured a lot of historical information as the events were unfolding.
This highlights an important benefit of using this collaborative tool platform to get things
done:
* materials are collected as they are generated and become a historical asset with no extra
work
You can see that the image is in slideshow mode for playing all the 68 related images on the
page.
25. http://montpelier.energy-team.org/safe_routes_to_school/topics/show/131-dropoffpickup-
volunteer-rotation
Here’s another practical use where a community Kete site for the Montpelier Energy Team site
is used to “scratch an itch”.
The Montpelier Energy Team is about encouraging conservation and here they lead by
example. They created a topic to schedule a Dropoff/Pickup Volunteer Rotation for the local
daycare.
A bit more mundane than a fight with Council, but you can see how they tailored the tool’s
use to their needs.
26. Not only do they have the table for the Rotation Schedule, but they add discussion to alert
each other of any issues that are out of the ordinary.
As you can see, each Kete site, is really defined by what you use it for and what you put into
it. The most successful sites become apart of how the community of users get things done.
27. https://kete.katipo.co.nz/
Here’s a third example. Katipo’s own Kete site.
We use this as both an intranet/wiki, where we record and share internal company knowledge
and processes, and an extranet where we collaborate with clients on their projects.
You can see that it appears to not have much content if you view the “Contents by type” list.
28. If I log in though, I get a much different view.
The site is actually quite full of material, it’s just mainly private.
The “Contents by type” now lists the private material that I have permission to see.
This suits our uses of Kete. Even though many Kete sites are all about public collaboration,
Kete is equally good at using the same tools to collaborate in a private manner appropriate to
the situation. I.e. Kete respects what we, Katipo, want to do with it.
33. http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/site/topics/show/114-horowhenua-county-council
This is a topic page and it’s an example of the second way Kete can be integrated with Koha.
I.e. it’s an item detail page, and the same process will work with image, audio, video,
document, or weblink detail pages.
Under “Other Resources”, again you can see matching results from HLT’s catalog.
You may ask how it is determining what “matches” if no user instigated search is done. In
Kete we simply submit the title of the page (either as a boolean “and” search or a boolean “or”
search, depending on your settings) to the external search source as search terms.
34. Lastly, you can pull in results from Koha on basket homepages.
In the sidebar, under “Just arrived...”, you can see the latest additions to the HLT catalog.
This differs from the other two ways in that it is based on a static URL (for the other ways, we
add the search terms to the external search sources’ base URL). It can be any complete URL
that returns a RSS or Atom feed.
Because Koha makes its search results available using the OpenSearch standard of having a
feed available for its search service we can integrate it into Kete in these three ways.
35. Use the search sources link to set up the first two and
the homepage options for a basket for the last.
The upper box will appear on every page of a basket for basket administrators and contains a
link that will let basket administrators set up the third type of Koha integration on a basket
homepage if they click on “preferences”. I’ll come back to showing what that looks like in a
few slides.
Below that, if I am logged in as a site administrator, ever page on the site will give me the
“Administrator’s Toolbox”. One of the links listed there is “search sources”. This will take
me to where I need to go to set up the two first options for Koha integration.
Let’s take a look at that first.
36. Here’s the meat of the external search sources page for Kete Horowhenua.
First up we have a summary of the configuration for HLT’s Koha’s catalog.
The key here is that the Base URL setting corresponds to an OpenSearch compatible URL for
the external service that will return a RSS/Atom feed for its results if we tack on our search
terms.
You may have already noticed by now that Koha is not the only service that Kete integrates
with. Here we have the set up for the Digital New Zealand source, too.
This works because they both provide OpenSearch style feeds for search results, we can have
as many OpenSearch compatible (Twitter, YouTube, to name a few) services as we would like
configured here.
Incidentally, Kete, by design, also fulfills this requirement and each Kete site can be used as
an external search source for not only Koha, but other instances of Kete itself. This is very
handy if you want to have a number of Kete sites affiliated with each other.
37. Here’s what the full configuration web form for creating or editing an external search source.
The “Source Target” is where we determine whether the service is available only on search
result pages or detail pages or both (which is what “all” means).
There are several other technical settings there that you can change. The form usually has
explanation under the field, but if that isn’t clear feel free to ask a question about it on
http://kete.net.nz.
So that is how you configure the first two options. It is powered by an open source Ruby on
Rails plugin that was written for Auckland City Libraries and Digital New Zealand by Katipo.
The code can be used in other Rails projects and is available at http://github.com/kete/
external_search_sources.
38. http://library.org.nz/
So how did I go about setting up the third way, including the “just arrived” items for the
catalog on the site’s basket homepage, of integration Koha into a Kete site?
First up you need to figure out the corresponding URL for the feed you want to include.
In this case, I noticed the “Just Arrived...” section on the Koha’s homepage.
I submitted the form and arrived at results page that had an RSS button. By clicking that
button, I ended up at a URL for the “just arrived” feed.
One thing to note is that that first feed URL was actually constrained to a particular category
of newly added stuff in the catalog. I did a little URL surgery and chopped that limitation out
of the feed and then copied it from the location bar.
39. Then I went over to Kete Horowhenua’s site basket’s “Homepage Options” form (accessible
via the “Tools for basket: Site” box > preferences link > “Homepage Options” tab).
Here’s the section, at the end of the form, where you can add a feed you want to pull from on
any basket’s homepage.
Note that you can have more than one and that you can cache the results to help your site’s
performance.
You may have noticed on Kete Katipo’s page that we had a few other services set up this way.
In our case we pulled from the latest items on our blog and on Kete.net.nz.
So again, it can be used with any URL that returns either of the open standards of RSS or
Atom feeds. In this case they don’t have to be limited to OpenSearch search services.
40. Koha can pull in Kete
results on its search
results page
41. http://library.org.nz/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?q=maori+battalion
Here’s a search results page in Koha’s OPAC showing Kete results alongside the local records
returned.
HLT’s installation of Koha includes code for doing pretty much the same thing as Kete does
for “external search sources”.
At this point, this is the only area of automated integration in Koha. However, on individual
records you can point back at a Kete site, just like any other URL, for a bibliographic record,
too.
42. Integrating Kete into
Koha
• Will be available in Koha 3.4 release
• Catalyst has public git commits that have
the code, if you want to back port to your
Koha: http://git.catalyst.net.nz/gw?
p=koha.git;a=summary
• There are several proposed improvements
that are similar to Kete’s ability to integrate
Koha
43. As a result of using the
OpenSearch standard,
Kete and Koha can
already integrate with
many other services.
44. Wrap up
• The original paper is available at
http://j.mp/9MCRD4
• This presentation, along with notes, will be
added to http://kete.net.nz
45. Extras...
Here are examples showing how Kete Horowhenua integrates with over 100 content providers
through Digital New Zealand (http://digitalnz.org) and thus gains rich results from
prestigious collections.
47. http://j.mp/9Z1t9y
You can see that it is from the New Zealand National Library’s Timeframes service that
includes records from the Alexander Turnbull Library.
It’s hooked me up with other stuff about Shannon that I might be interested in, but from an
outside collection.
48. http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/search.aspx?term=levin
That’s not all, of course, using the open standard OAI-PMH DC to make each Kete’s site’s
public metadata available (i.e. all text, plus things like links to thumbnail images), over
twenty Kete sites are Digital New Zealand content providers.
These Kete sites materials now show up wherever Digital New Zealand search service is used,
such as the Te Papa’s (New Zealand national museum) online collection search as you can
seen here.
This completes the circle. Kete pulls in material and pushes out material equally easily and
allows New Zealand Kete sites to become well integrated into overall culture and heritage
collections of the nation.